Robert Giroux, a distinguished giant of 20th century publishing who guided and supported dozens of great writers from T.S. Eliot and Jack Kerouac to Bernard Malamud and Susan Sontag, died in his sleep early Friday morning. He was 94.
Giroux, who helped create one of the most notable publishing houses -- Farrar, Straus & Giroux -- had been in failing health and died at an assisted living facility in Tinton Falls, N.J., said Jeff Seroy, a Farrar, Straus spokesman.
Known throughout the industry for his taste and discretion, Giroux began in 1940 as an editor at Harcourt, Brace & Co. and had so great a reputation that when he left in 1955 for what was then Farrar, Straus, more than a dozen writers joined him, including Flannery O'Connor, Malamud and Eliot, a close friend.
Giroux joined Farrar as editor in chief and was made a full partner in 1964, his reserved demeanor in contrast to that of the company's boisterous founder and president, Roger Straus. Straus and Giroux thrived together even as they endlessly complained about each other, with Straus regarding Giroux as a snob, and Giroux looking upon Straus as more a businessman than a man of letters.
During Giroux's 60-year career, some of the world's most celebrated writers published works for the publisher, including Nobel Prize winners Isaac Bashevis Singer, Derek Walcott, Nadine Gordimer and Seamus Heaney. Authors were known to turn down more money from competitors for the privilege of being signed on by Farrar, Straus.
"The single most important thing to happen to this company was the arrival of Bob Giroux," Straus, who died in 2004, once said.
Even after the company sold controlling interest in 1994 to German publisher Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck, it retained its reputation as an upholder of old-fashioned standards, more attuned to lasting quality than to instant profit. Sometimes it achieved both, with such works as Jonathan Franzen's "The Corrections," Jeffrey Eugenides' "Middlesex" and Marilynne Robinson's "Gilead."
Giroux was an author himself, writing "The Book Known as Q: A Consideration of Shakespeare's Sonnets." He also contributed introductions to "The Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connor" and to anthologies of Malamud, John Berryman and Elizabeth Bishop. But a planned memoir was never completed.
Able to work with relative freedom, Giroux was still a strong critic of contemporary publishing, which he believed had become too money-minded. "Editors used to be known by their authors," he observed in a 1981 lecture. "Now some of them are known by their restaurants."
